Author Archives: Brock Tice

Vacation Notice

I’ll be traveling around Europe, mostly Austria and a little in Germany and the Netherlands, from this evening through the evening of August 30th. As such, my ability to communicate will be diminished.

I’ll acquire a local SIM card and post the number here if I get a chance. I’ll change my GrandCentral voicemail greeting so that it gives the number. Also, this and my other domains are in the process of being transferred between registrars. I had thought it would be done by now, but it’s not. Therefore, I’ve asked a friend to take care of the details while I’m away, but you may see some interruption in the availability of this and some of my other sites (like brocktice.com). Please accept my apologies in advance.

Assuming the site is up, I do hope to post pictures when I get the chance, and updates on how things are going.

If you need to get ahold of me while I’m gone, your best bet is to call my GrandCentral number, +1-(651)-967-7961, and leave me a message. I’ll be checking my voicemail regularly and will be able to call you back pretty cheaply. SMS to whatever my Austrian number is will also be a fast and economical method of getting ahold of me. If you choose to do that, please keep in mind that Austria is 6 time zones ahead of EDT, and 7 ahead of CDT.

Upgrade

After ignoring many, many new WordPress versions, dreading upgrade complications, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to the very-much-different WordPress 2.6. This mostly went smoothly due to the use of the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

Unfortunately, I did encounter one major hiccup, the details of which and solution(s) to are described here. Note that while the post only describes a fix to post category name problems, someone gives analogous directions for fixing link categories as well in the comments.

If you observe or experience any problems with the site post-upgrade, please let me know in the comments of this post, or by email. Thanks!
Apparently somewhere along the line, WordPress added tags. I’ve basically been using Categories as tags all this time, when what I really wanted was tags. Maybe I’ll write some SQL stuff to go through and convert categories to tags at some point.

Hiatus

After a valiant attempt to keep up a regular posting schedule starting in January and lasting until about March, this blog has been on an unofficial hiatus for a while. I’m making it official today.

I am a new (as in recent) homeowner, I’m trying to graduate, I moved across the country, and I have a baby arriving in two months. This morning I had an epiphany — even though I try to keep anything that’s not immediately important in my Someday/Maybe category (in GTD), all kinds of things had crept in to my active system that were not pressing. A number of those things were blog post topics for VirtuallyShocking. After doing an aggressive move of many items to the Someday category, my active, actionable items dropped from about 80 to 35, and I can see now looking at the list that it will be much easier to retain my focus.

I’ve never been a terribly prolific blogger — this is mostly a diary blog, despite my best intentions to the contrary. In that vein, it will continue. I’ll probably keep up with the hearty Friday posts and occasional updates. Part of the reason for this is that most of the cardiac electrophysiology stuff that I’ve really wanted to blog about, I can’t, because the stuff I’m excited about is stuff I’m working on. That stuff generally needs to remain private until the related papers are published, at which point I’m generally already more excited about the next thing, and not interested in talking about the older stuff.

Hopefully once I graduate that will start to change, and I can build this blog the way I’ve really wanted to.